This article uses the records of nineteenth-century Scottish banks in an attempt to understand investor behaviour in the early British capital market. It presents four main findings, some of which do not conform to the basic assumptions of standard asset pricing theories. First, in an era when...

Using annual will indexes, a series of wealth concentration is constructed for the north of Ireland on a decennial basis for the period 1858 to 2001. Wealth was highly concentrated at the beginning of the sample period, but inequality falls towards the end of the nineteenth century and continues...

In 1878, one of Britain's largest banks, the City of Glasgow Bank, collapsed, leaving a huge deficit between its assets and liabilities. As this bank, similar to many other contemporary British banks, had unlimited liability, its failure was accompanied by the bankruptcy of the vast majority of...